Re: Issue variants

We have a couple of fields in the GCD that are related to this stuff.
TL;DR:  It's messy and could use streamlining.  We're slowly improving in this area.

These fields have evolved from older, less structured fields, or have been kind of glued on top of the older structure.  Part of what I'm doing right now is trying to lay the groundwork for a lot of cleanup that will be implemented over the next couple of years based on the availability of tech volunteers and/or budget for paid tech work.  Anyway... some fields:
* Publication Type:  This is currently an enumeration of "book", "magazine", or "album" (the last one being mostly for European publishing formats).  An addition for mass-market paperbacks is being considered, as they behave rather differently than trade paperbacks and hardcovers (which would both stay "book"s- there's a separate Binding field that would further distinguish them).  This is partially to help with searching, and partially to allow us to (someday) show different fields for different types.  I suspect if we were more fluent in various Asian countries' publishing conventions, we would have a few more publication types to cover them.
Looking at your BookFormatType, we avoided "graphic novel" because we could spend years arguing over what that means.  I see that you specifically included bound collections of ComicIssues, which makes the term clear :-)  I don't think we even tried to come to agreement on that term!
* Publishing Format:  This is a free text field, but the typical values are "one-shot", "limited series", "ongoing", and "was ongoing" (technically, there's a separate field for marking a series that is being actively published, but for historical reasons you'll still see "was ongoing" a lot).
* Other stuff:For "ashcan", we've started using the keywords field for that.  It's a fairly specific artifact of early american comics publishing.  Arguably it could be a value in "Publishing Format"- I don't think that's ever come up.  Isn't it fun when explaining things to other people makes you realize how strange the things are?  :-P

"key issue" and "warehouse copy" would probably also be keywords.
I'm not sure where "complete run" would go.  That's more of a buy/sell/collection management thing.  Our collection management tool is in public beta right now, but I don't think we have a flag for "complete run" there.  Is "warehouse copy" also a collection management thing?  That's a new term for me!

In general, coming up with a structure that fits both books and periodicals, and periodical-ish series of books, is hard.  I'm sure you have all noticed this :-P
cheers,-henry

      From: Tom Adamich <vls@tusco.net>
 To: 'Richard Wallis' <richard.wallis@dataliberate.com> 
Cc: hha1@cornell.edu; public-schemabibex@w3.org; shallphillips@naswa.org 
 Sent: Monday, October 5, 2015 8:44 AM
 Subject: RE: Issue variants
   
#yiv6695174715 #yiv6695174715 -- _filtered #yiv6695174715 {font-family:Helvetica;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} _filtered #yiv6695174715 {font-family:Helvetica;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;} _filtered #yiv6695174715 {font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;} _filtered #yiv6695174715 {font-family:Tahoma;panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;}#yiv6695174715 #yiv6695174715 p.yiv6695174715MsoNormal, #yiv6695174715 li.yiv6695174715MsoNormal, #yiv6695174715 div.yiv6695174715MsoNormal {margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;}#yiv6695174715 a:link, #yiv6695174715 span.yiv6695174715MsoHyperlink {color:blue;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv6695174715 a:visited, #yiv6695174715 span.yiv6695174715MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv6695174715 p {margin-right:0in;margin-left:0in;font-size:12.0pt;}#yiv6695174715 p.yiv6695174715MsoAcetate, #yiv6695174715 li.yiv6695174715MsoAcetate, #yiv6695174715 div.yiv6695174715MsoAcetate {margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:8.0pt;}#yiv6695174715 span.yiv6695174715BalloonTextChar {}#yiv6695174715 span.yiv6695174715EmailStyle20 {color:#1F497D;}#yiv6695174715 .yiv6695174715MsoChpDefault {} _filtered #yiv6695174715 {margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}#yiv6695174715 div.yiv6695174715WordSection1 {}#yiv6695174715 …Sounds logical, Richard.  I’m not a comic book expert either; however, I do understand your attempt to establish the framework for enumeration within this particular type (using the comic book lexicon Henry references in his discussion).  Again, the ultimate goal being to enhance the search experience using targeted vocabulary familiar to the population(s) served.  Take care.  Tom  Tom Adamich, MLSPresidentVisiting Librarian Service224 Chauncey Ave. N.W.P.O. Box 932New Philadelphia, OH 44663330-364-4410vls@tusco.net  

From: Richard Wallis [mailto:richard.wallis@dataliberate.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 5, 2015 11:35 AM
To: Tom Adamich
Cc: hha1@cornell.edu; public-schemabibex@w3.org; shallphillips@naswa.org
Subject: Re: Issue variants  Not being an aficionado of comics, these look like an enumeration of issue types to me.    If my assumption is correct my first question is, is there an external source for these and other types we could reference from a new property such as comicIssueType - or would there be few enough of them, the meaning of which are generally understood, for an enumeration type to be proposed with a small set of enumeration types.  This would be similar in principle to BookFormatType, plus Hardcover, EBook, etc.
Richard WallisFounder, Data Liberatehttp://dataliberate.comLinkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallisTwitter: @rjw  On 5 October 2015 at 12:16, Tom Adamich <vls@tusco.net> wrote:Great discussion.  However, are we really talking about “issue” here?  Should work be done to build out the properties associated with ComicIssue https://bib.schema.org/ComicIssue ? Should the following be included?·         One shot·         Ashcan·         Complete run·         Key issue·         Warehouse copy I’m trying to work within the lexicon of the comic book industry as a means of targeting the search experience. Thanks for the educational opportunity. Tom   Tom Adamich, MLSPresidentVisiting Librarian Service224 Chauncey Ave. N.W.P.O. Box 932New Philadelphia, OH 44663330-364-4410vls@tusco.net From: hha1@cornell.edu [mailto:hha1@cornell.edu] 
Sent: Monday, October 5, 2015 3:00 AM
To: public-schemabibex@w3.org
Subject: Issue variants Hi folks,  Variants are an active topic of discussion within the GCD right now.  I see that you have a variantCover description field, which handles one of the most common cases.  However, there are a number of "variants" in GCD terminology.  Newsstand vs direct distribution.  Price variants.  Some publishers published versions of issues with ads and without ads.  Etc.   If you want to handle more types of variants than just covers, I would recommend considering changing "variantCover" to "variantName" or something similar.  Depending on how much detail you want to get into, I can talk about how we're considering putting some more structure around variants, as collectors care a lot about some types (incentive covers) but less about others (newsstand vs direct).   There is also the question of how to refer to an issue in general, without specifying a particular variant.  We haven't actually sorted that out- it's a topic from the past week or two.   I'm not trying to get the schema to handle every little thing here, I'm just trying to raise topics that have caused us difficulty.  I'll happily drop any topic deemed out of scope. thanks,-henry